by Ian Ker
22 Oddie, 267.
23 A. 276–7.
24 John D. Coates, Chesterton and the Edwardian Cultural Crisis (Hull: Hull University Press, 1984), 85, 87, not only argues that ‘to read Chesterton as an artist one has, of course, to cut through his own disclaimers and constant self-deprecation, one of the thickets of Chesterton criticism’, but he claims that Chesterton ‘did his subtlest thinking’ in his fiction rather than in his journalism. However, Chesterton’s ‘self-deprecation’ was not ‘constant’: he was self-deprecatory about his fiction but not his journalism.
25 MC 77.
26 ILN xxxiv. 88.
27 A. 111.
28 Ian Boyd, The Novels of G.K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda (London: Paul Elek, 1975), 9–10, points out that the ‘novels mediate a distinctive political and social view of life’ and are therefore ‘the kind of literature’ that the Victorian ‘sages wrote’. But he fails to recognize that Chesterton mediated his view of life much better through his non-fiction prose writings, or to ask the question why in that case he wrote novels. Boyd argues that ‘in the very passage’ of the Autobiography ‘in which he deprecates the value of the novels as works of literature he makes a claim for their serious value as journalism’ (p. 6). However, Chesterton does no such thing: he simply says that he ‘could not be a novelist’ but that he ‘could be a journalist’—not that his novels are journalism, which, of course, they are not.
29 MO 163.
30 OS 92; CT 19.
31 A. 108–10.
32 A. 132–3, 135.
33 A. 111.
34 Clemens, 16–17.
35 Ward, GKC 152–3.
36 Clemens, 17.
37 Ward, RC 76–7. According to Barker, 144, the story of the circumstances of the book’s publication was a ‘legend … just part of the image creation’. But, while Chesterton was certainly not the most accurate of people and his memory cannot always be trusted in the Autobiography, he did not invent stories to his own self-advantage, rather the opposite. Nor was lying part of his character, any more than it was of Frances’s. The essentials of the story were true; it was just that Chesterton had muddled them.
38 Ffinch, 126.
39 NNH 237, 239, 252 254, 266, 272 275, 277, 279, 288–9 355, 364.
40 NNH 279, 302, 356, 376, 378–9.
41 CC 43.
42 PI 595, 603, 618. Oddie, 261–3, compares Conrad Noel’s contribution to the volume, which defends patriotism ‘by relating it specifically to Catholic sacramental theology’ according to which God is present, for example, in a single piece of bread consecrated in the Mass, and suggests that this sacramental principle that Chesterton learned from Noel and his Anglo-Catholic friends lent theological force to his philosophy of limitation.
43 PI 598–9, 606.
44 PI 601, 604–6, 612, 618.
45 Ffinch, 114. John O’Connor to G. K. Chesterton, 11 Feb. 1903, BL Add. MS 73196, fo. 31.
46 O’Connor, 1.
47 John O’Connor to G. K. Chesterton, 4 Oct. 1903, BL Add. MS 73196, fo. 35.
48 O’Connor, 1.
49 John O’Connor to Frances Chesterton, 6 Dec. 1903, BL Add. MS 73196,
50 Barker, 153.
51 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 286.
52 Clemens, 41–3.
53 A. 314.
54 A. 314–15.
55 Ffinch, 132.
56 A. 315. According to Aidan Mackey, whose source was Dorothy Collins, it is a true story. In those days, even in small railway stations, it was possible to ask the station master to send a telegram down the line, using his morse code signalling key.
57 G. K. Chesterton to Mrs John Lane, n.d., JJBL.
58 A. 316–18. Clemens, 139–40, has Chesterton giving a slightly different account.
59 O’Connor, 36, 39.
60 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 284–7.
61 A. 136, 264.
62 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 287–8.
63 Barker, 130–1.
64 A. 265–7.
65 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 288.
66 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton, 288–9.
67 CQT 51.
68 NNH 221.
69 They are too readily dismissed by Ward, GKC 155, and Ffinch, 132.
70 CQT 67, 88.
71 WC 57; MC 5–6.
72 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton, 289–90.
73 Ward, GKC 141.
74 Ward, GKC 142.
75 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 290.
76 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 290.
77 A. 263–4.
78 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 290.
79 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 290.
80 See David Evans, ‘The Making of G. K. Chesterton’s Heretics’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 5 (1975), 207–13. Evans, p. 207, points out that his journalism gave Chesterton ‘the first opportunity to formulate many of his characteristic turns of expression and thought in print.
81 Oddie, 288.
82 The failure to appreciate the explicitly Christian, and indeed Catholic, apologetic in Heretics is common among critics of Chesterton, beginning with his own brother, who complained (CC 152) that he ‘criticizes his opponents with much vigour and acumen. But he does not very clearly define, much less defend, his own position.’ See also Gary Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 87, 89, who maintains that it is not Christian apologetics but a defence of ‘philosophy itself and that Christianity is merely seen as a ‘fine code of common sense’; Adam Schwartz, The Third Spring: G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 58, who claims that Heretics is ‘the best example’ of the early ‘phase when Chesterton ‘continued to define himself negatively, as against modern theology and philosophy, leaving his affirmation of orthodox Christianity largely implied’; and David Dooley, foreword to H. 22, who states: ‘By showing what heresy implies, Chesterton illustrates what orthodoxy implies. Cf. Oddie, 288, 290–6.
83 Ward, GKC 159.
84 Oddie, 286.
85 H. 40–1, 46, 49, 51, 65–6, 113, 201–3, 205–7.
86 H. 53, 196–8.
87 A. 148.
88 H. 106–7, 124–6.
89 H. 127–8.
90 A. 135.
91 H.77, 129, 131
92 H. 69-70.
93 H. 71–2, 126, 138–41.
94 H. 141–5.
95 H. 169–73.
96 H. 85, 152, 160.
97 H. 87–8, 96.
98 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton’, 291.
99 A. 253.
100 ‘Diary of Frances Chesterton, 291.
101 A. 120–2; 250–1, 255.
102 A. 124–5.
103 Ward, GKC 251–2.
1 Barker, 160–2.
2 A. 126.
3 Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), 207.
4 Oddie, 222.
5 Ward, GKC 109–10.
6 Ward, GKC 161–4.
7 Dorothy Collins’s notes for talks, BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 141.
8 Ward, RC 80–3, 86.
9 Ward, RC 79 quotes a poem by Chesterton, ‘dated by Frances May 1906’, which ‘belongs to this time’. Frances Ivens, the gynaecological surgeon who performed the operation (see above, Ch. 3, n. 7), worked at the Clapham Maternity Hospital from 1902 to 1907, when she went to Liverpool (The Medical Directory, 1908), so the operation could not have been later than 1907.
10 Frances Chesterton to John O’Connor, 12 April [sic], BL Add. MS 73196, fo. 43.
11 See above, Ch. 3, n. 7.
12 Margaret Joyce to Dorothy Collins, 25 Oct. 1942, BL Add. MS 73475A, fos 72–3. See also Ward, GKC 210–11.
13 Ward, RC 78–9.
14 Ward, RC 87–8.
15 Ward, GKC 55, with text corrected from BL Add. MS 73191, fo. 143.
16 Ward, RC 89–91.
17 CD 42–4, 46.
18 CD 46–51.
19 CD 60–2, 66–7.
20 CD 64–5.
21 CD 107.
22 CD 68, 190–2.
23 CD 137–9.
24 LL 141.
25 CD 138–40; ACD 313–14.
26 CD 130–2, 201.
27 CD 89, 96, 128, 137, 162, 178, 187, 209; ACD 272, 292, 336. See also Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 79–89.
28 CD 94, 104,147, 184–5, 187–8; ACD 261, 326.
29 CD 146–7, 175–6, 185–6, 188–9.
30 CD 199.
31 CD 84–5, 87–9, 123.
32 CD 91–3, 203; ACD 406.
33 CD 100–1, 103, 111–12, 128–9, 148; ACD 264.
34 CD 164–7.
35 CD 170, 175–6, 181, 184; ACD 253, 276–7, 299, 387.
36 CD 176.
37 Ward, GKC 156.
38 Kate Perugini to G. K. Chesterton, 26 Oct. 1906, BL Add. MS 73239, fo. 64.
39 CD 75–6.
40 Kate Perugini to G. K. Chesterton, 26 Oct. 1906, BL Add. MS 73239, fo. 65; Kate Perugini to G. K. Chesterton, n.d., BL Add. MS 73239, fo. 71.
41 Kate Perugini to G. K. Chesterton, 26 Oct. 1906, BL Add. MS 73239, fo. 65.
42 Frances Chesterton to Mr Methuen, 25 Nov. [sic], BL Add. MS 73231 A, fo. 4. The letter has been annotated in pencil, presumably by Dorothy Collins, ‘1905’, but it is clear that it belongs to 1906.
43 Kate Perugini to Frances Chesterton, n.d., BL Add. MS 73239, fo. 66.
44 There is no obvious text that Kate Perugini was thinking of when she complained about what Chesterton had said about her father’s railings’, but since the glaring error about the sisters was never corrected, it is hardly likely that this mistake was ever corrected. She may have been thinking of this sentence: He was everything that we currently call a weak man; he was a man hung on wires; he was a man who might at any moment cry like a child; he was so sensitive to criticism that one may say that he lacked a skin; he was so nervous that he allowed great tragedies in his life to arise only out of nerves’ (CD 71). Or there are the later sentences, Sometimes his nerve snapped; and then he was mad’ (CD 167), and he had the temper of an irrational invalid’ (CD 174).
45 Kate Perugini to Frances Chesterton, 28 Aug. 1910, BL Add. MS 73239, fos 69–70.
46 BL Add. MS 73477, fo. 112.
47 Ward, GKC 156.
48 George Bernard Shaw to G. K. Chesterton, 6 Sept. 1906, in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1898–1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (London: Max Reinhardt, 1972), 646.
49 Ward, GKC 323.
50 Barker, 163–4.
51 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 461.
52 A. 176–8.
53 A. 179–80.
54 A. 180–1, 185.
55 CP i. 408–11.
56 Pearce, 105–6.
57 MT 472.
58 C. S. Lewis, who first made the parallel with Kafka, speaks of ‘the exhilaration as well as the terror’. However, Bernard Bergonzi ignores the terror when he says that Chesterton’s story never rises above the level of a charade, or at least a prolonged and ingenious joke’. Conlon ii. 72, 182.
59 See above, p. 126.
60 Cf. Sullivan, 38; Wills, Chesterton: Man and Mask, 125.
61 ILN xxxii. 432.
62 MT 490, 508.
63 MT 508–9, 511, 518–19, 526.
64 MT 608, 613, 619, 621–2, 631–4.
65 This is why it should not be judged as though it were a realistic novel and criticized for its improbabilities and discrepancies and obscurity, as Kingsley Amis and David Lodge do (Conlon ii. 271—2, 330—1). Amis also objects to Sunday’s buffoonery (Sullivan, 35–6)—but in dreams the most extraordinary and ludicrous things are said and done. However, that does not mean the book can be interpreted to mean anything, regardless of the text and Chesterton’s own explanation of it, as in Adam Schwartz’s bizarre misreading in The Third Spring, 50–4. According to Schwartz, Sunday’s peace is unforgivable because it is peace as the world gives peace’ and is a source of temptation to the detectives. Schwartz quotes the Secretary’s refusal to forgive Sunday his ‘peace’; but omits his reason—how in that case can Sunday be both the good chief detective and the evil President of the Council? According to Schwartz, Gregory is ‘the sole sincere anarchist in the book’, who chides Sunday and his minions for their capitulation to comfort and their consequent ignorance of, and inattention to, the sufferings of the weak’. (Actually at the beginning of the novel in real life, Syme reassures his sister that Gregory is insincere’ as an anarchist and says more than he really means, as anyone does who, for example, ‘thanks’ someone for passing the salt.) Schwartz then interprets Syme’s realization of why he had to suffer as being the realization of the importance of’ solidarity with the sufferings of others’—having just quoted Syme’s realization that he had to suffer in order to fling Satan’s lie back in the face of the blasphemer Gregory! Schwartz again misunderstands the final scene of the nightmare when Gregory appears, as in the Book of Job, before God (Sunday) as Satan (Lucifer) among the ‘sons of God’, the angels, that is, the detectives, who cannot, pace Schwartz, be Job’s comforters’ because they obviously do not appear in the two scenes referred to in the Book of Job that take place in heaven. Finally, Schwartz quotes Christ’s words Can ye drink … ‘as being the words of Sun-day—but then bizarrely accuses Sunday and the detectives of falling under Christ’s condemnation of the sons of Zebedee. For Sunday can hardly be both Christ and one of the sons of Zebedee—any more than Gregory can be both the ‘accuser’ of the Book of Job, that is, Satan and the Christ who rebukes the ‘pride’ of Sunday and the detectives (according to Schwartz, the sons of Zebedee).
66 A. 103–4.
67 MT 470, 472, 583–4.
68 Observer, 10 Jan. 1926, partially repr. in Ward, GKC 168–9.
69 Illustrated Sunday Herald, 24 Jan. 1926.
1 A. 205, 208–9.
2 Letters of William James, ed. Henry James (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1926), 241, 257
3 H. G. Wells, Experiments in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), ii (London: Victor Gollancz and the Cresset Press, 1934), 538.
4 William James could have been trying to look into the main garden of 4 Mermaid St, or alternatively into the so-called ‘secret garden’ (which now belongs to 7 Mermaid St) that was then rented by James to 4 Mermaid St, which had access to it through a gate made in the wall. James had bought this ‘secret garden’ in 1903 from J. H. Gasson, a local tradesman who had bought 6 Mermaid St, to which the garden then belonged. On 16 Feb. 1903 James wrote to his secretary Mary Weld from London to say that he had just heard that ‘Gasson the dreadful’ had bought ‘the house and garden in Mermaid Street, that menaces and (potentially by any building on the ground) would fatally injure the west end of my garden. I have had to buy the ground from him at an extortionate price and now have got to spend money on enclosing it…’ (Henry James Letters, iv. 18gy—1916, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 267). H. Montgomery Hyde, The Story of Lamb House: The Home of Henry James (Rye: Adams of Rye, 1966), 77, adds that James was afraid of being overlooked if a house was built on the plot, a fear he may have remembered when rebuking his brother for attempting to look over the wall. See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972), 178, for James’s leasing the ‘secret garden’ to a neighbour, who must have been the occupant of 4 Mermaid St, given the existence of the gate into its garden. It is also conceivable that the Chestertons had taken a house in Watchbell St, which runs off West St, parallel with Mermaid St, the only other street that has gardens adjoining the wall of Lamb House garden.
5 Wells, Experiments, 538.
6 Edel, James: the Master, 374.
7 James worked in the summer in a garden room that had a window looking i
nto West Street.
8 Edel, James: the Master, 373.